After Long Silence Read online

  The following week, of course, she’d dutifully powder her face, apply her Cherry Blossom lipstick, don one of her postwar Italian dresses, and poke the nose of the Dodge Dart down the driveway and out to church. She’d made a vow, she told me later, a deal with God, and she did not dare back down.

  I did not have that sort of relationship with God. I glimpsed bits of Him here and there, but I never talked directly to Him. I could usually find His beauty on the TV, during particularly eloquent moments of grace and violence on The NFL Today. But I never thought of God during the elbow-scraping fights I got into on the playground, when Jimmy Delaponti’s knee was crushing my ribs, or when I smashed my knuckles in Jimmy’s face. My everyday life was unencumbered by religious concerns.

  It occurs to me now that my parents were not keen on organized religion or orthodoxy of any sort. It was as if they had read the Cliff Notes on Catholicism, just as they subscribed to the family architectural principle of form over function. From the outside we looked like a typical happy family; it was an image that we all worked hard to achieve.

  When I was nine my parents sent me to a summer camp on a remote island off the coast of northern Maine. My cabinmate and soulmate was Twinky James, a hefty lion-haired maiden straight out of the Valkyrie, with solid white calves and smooth, milky skin. She had the beginning nips of breasts, a tuft of pale yellow fuzz between her legs, which made me feel boyish and lucky. The others have slipped from my memory, except our counselor, Katherine, a tall, graceless teenager shaped like an ironing board, with thick glasses magnifying her brittle self-righteousness. She once turned me and Twinky in for eating a pack of M&M’s after lights-out.

  On Sunday mornings we were expected to get up before dawn, pull on our little white skirts and blouses and socks and shoes, and assemble in the gravel parking lot behind the dining hall in the dark. Yawning and nodding, we were herded onto a school bus, which began the long, bumpy journey across the bay to a church in the town of Dragamond. There we could worship to our heart’s content, file back on the bus, and ride back to camp in the afternoon, thereby blowing more than half of a perfectly good day.

  Nearly all of my cabinmates were Protestants, and our counselor, a devout Catholic, urged them to go to church as good Christians; to my amazement, nearly all of them did—if not eagerly, then at least obediently. As for me, the only other Catholic in the bunch, Katherine simply ordered me to attend church.

  “But church is optional,” I whined. “I don’t want to go! Pleeeease!”

  “God is not discretionary!” Katherine informed me coldly. “It’s your obligation as a Catholic to go to church.” Her enormous eyes seemed to pop out from behind those octagonal plastic frames. “I will see to it that you are on the bus,” she continued. “I will not stand by and watch you commit a mortal sin.

  I sneaked a glance at Twinky, pigtailed, Protestant, eyes squinting like slit envelopes. She flashed me a smile behind her pink hands.

  “But, Katherine,” I pleaded, “I don’t even have to go to church at home!” It struck me as the height of injustice that I should be forced to attend church now that I was on vacation.

  Katherine sent me to see the Directors of the camp—two large, middle-aged sisters in stretch pants, one of whom I felt strangely fond of, perhaps because her name was also Helen. I sat in a rough-hewn straight-back chair, feet dangling a few inches above the pinewood floor, and stated my case. The Directors seemed reasonable and agreed to write my parents, asking their wishes.

  Did I suffer pangs of doubt? I don’t think so. Still, I was skeptical of the Camp Directors’ ability to interpret my parents’ wishes in my absence. A tense week trickled by. My mother finally rescued me, sending the Directors written permission for me to skip church. Joyously relieved, I pranced around my cabin, dangling my mother’s letter in Katherine’s enraged face. “I don’t have to go to chuu-urch,” I sang gleefully, over and over. It was my most delicious religious experience.

  The following summer I finally confessed to Twinky what the Russians had done to my father. We were walking to our cabin in the woods from the lavabo after brushing our teeth. I don’t remember what we were talking about—but for some reason the story about my father in Siberia was weighing on me.

  “Listen, Twinky,” I said, “I want to tell you something.” We were holding our toothbrushes in front of us like candles.

  “My father was put in a concentration camp by the Russians,” I said. “For six years. In Siberia. That’s a really cold part of Russia. A bunch of prisoners ganged up on him and broke his arm—” Suddenly I was fighting back tears, alarmed, and ashamed of my inexplicable need to tell someone. Twinky stared at me with horror, and the two of us were speechless for several seconds while I looked down at the ground and blinked my eyes.

  “Gee,” Twinky said helplessly. “Gee, that’s—what did they—why did they do that?”

  My lip started trembling. I shrugged but couldn’t speak. Night was falling softly, the air cooled, and the woods darkened. Mosquitoes found us, landed softly on our arms and legs. We slapped at them and walked back to the cabin. I was amazed and embarrassed by my emotion, which seemed to have arrived like an alien invasion, and I realized that I must never speak of our family, that our story must be kept a secret. I clutched my elbows in front of me. My smooth arms had grown from his shattered life.

  In the eighth grade many of my friends were getting middle names. They were going through a ritual called Confirmation, which, I gathered, had something to do with the Church and Catholicism. The middle names captured my imagination. I was trying to decide what name I would pick for myself. My friends were all getting stupid names, like Mary and Elizabeth and Christina. I already had a stupid name—Helen. I wanted something dashing and adventurous, like Gonzalez or Vladimir.

  I asked my mother about this business of Confirmation and whether I, too, could choose a middle name. My mother had never heard of Confirmation and scoffed at the idea. “We didn’t have anything like that in Poland,” she said with great disdain. “It must be some American invention.”

  This made sense to me, since there were a great many foolish American institutions that did not exist in Poland. Among these were frat parties and cheerleaders, homecoming queens and prom nights, drive-in movies and backseat sex. Confirmation, I concluded, was simply one more mindless American ritual like the Miss America Pageant. I never thought of it again but was grateful that I didn’t have to go through the ordeal, which obviously involved more Sunday school attendance and more dressing up. The only thing I missed was the chance to acquire a more exciting name.

  What I didn’t realize was that all our names had been recently invented. My mother had survived the war using a false name and papers: she had escaped from the Nazis dressed as an Italian soldier, under yet another name and false papers. My parents had changed our family name upon applying for citizenship in the United States. To this day I don’t even know what my mother’s real name is.

  2

  When I was sixteen or seventeen, our family was invited to Susie Janiczek’s wedding. Her parents were Auschwitz survivors and close friends of our parents’. They’d met in rural Michigan in 1953, when Dr. Janiczek helped my father set up his medical practice.

  Dressed in our Sunday best, our family piled into my father’s forest-green Chrysler New Yorker and followed the stream of big boxy American cars from the temple to the Sheraton hotel for the reception.

  “My parents survived,” Susie addressed the hundreds of Holocaust survivors in the ballroom, “and have given me this, a new life, new friends, the future.” Flashbulbs snapped, and a hush fell over the room. “We have conquered the past,” Susie added triumphantly to the nodding hairsprayed heads “We have conquered Hitler! We will survive. We will flourish.” She raised her white-gloved arms over her head, and the crowd cheered. A band of musicians in electric-blue tuxedos lifted their instruments from black cases behind her.

  Lara and I and the handful of other American-born youngsters were paraded around and shown off by the older generation, who chattered among themselves in impenetrable Polish. Middle-aged ladies with layers of hair coloring and penciled eyebrows, sumptuously retouched lips, glossy fingernails in shades of berries. They clasped my hand with their diamond-studded fingers, smiled and assessed my figure, talking the whole time in Polish to my mother, who beamed with pride.

  The men clustered together—solid black-and-white islands in the sea of colorful women. Unbuttoning their jackets, they smoked filterless cigarettes and drank champagne from slender flute glasses, their cheeks growing redder and redder.

  I was used to seeing tattooed numbers on wrists and hearing Polish- and German-peppered accents—many of my parents’ closest friends were survivors. I liked the way the wedding celebration was turning into a joyous, arrogant in-your-face to history, to gas chambers and ghettos and starvation and mass murders, as if it were my personal mission to fly in the face of oppression. I was proof of the tenacity of my parents, and I was fiercely proud of them. The only glaring gap in my understanding of the war against the Jews was my family’s precise role in it.

  It didn’t bother me that Lara and I were the only non-Jews at that wedding. We were the children of survivors in an ocean of survivors, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world for us to celebrate—religion didn’t seem to enter into it. My mother explained the Jewish traditions—the chuppah, the chairs, the broken champagne glass, so that I understood what was happening. I never questioned how she knew so much. I was used to my mother’s complete fluency with the world.

  It never occurred to me that someone in my family might actually be Jewish, until a few years ago, when I was already in my thirties and working as a public defender in Boston. One evening, at a Bar Ass
ociation cocktail party, I was introduced to a statuesque high-heeled, slim-hipped woman, the wife of a partner in a Boston firm. She told me she was the daughter of a distinguished family of Philadelphia WASPs, and only after she had married and had three children did she discover that her mother was in fact Jewish. We exchanged family stories over a glass of wine, and she threw back her head and laughed. “You’re Jewish!” she said.

  “No,” I insisted, “Catholic. Polish Catholic.”

  “Then why were your parents in concentration camps?” Her eyes gleamed a beautiful emerald-green, and she tried to suppress a smile She did not look the least bit Jewish. When she laughed, her yellow hair seemed to break around her shoulders like waves on a beach.

  “Lots of Poles were imprisoned during the war or taken by the Germans,” I explained. “They—”

  “Of course,” she interrupted, “but if they were Catholic they wouldn’t have had to escape and emigrate to the States. I bet your parents were Jewish. Or at least your mother.”

  It didn’t take more than half a glass of wine for me to grow fond of the idea. This would explain so much, I thought—all those mysteries of childhood, my endless tiptoeing around a jigsaw-puzzle past in which all the pieces were missing except my parents. As a child my questions about our family had always elicited strange, winding soliloquies that led to bedtime or, worse, dinner, the two most dreaded events of my day. And when Lara and I had fought as children, my mother sometimes fell to her knees, sobbing, “I should have died with my parents! I shouldn’t have lived! Bosze, Bosze, Bosze.” God, God, God. This was always a shoe-in to make Lara and me stop fighting and turn into perfect children before her eyes. But by the time Mom had called upon Bosze, she was beyond noticing us.

  Perhaps, I now thought, all these mysteries could be explained: Maybe we were Jewish.

  A few months later I ran the idea past Lara, who was living in San Diego and working as a psychiatrist. “I have this theory,” I told her over the phone. “What if Mom and Dad were Jewish? Or maybe one of their parents was Jewish.”

  A long silence. “I really doubt it,” she finally said.

  “Well, I know it sounds crazy,” I said quickly. “I mean, it’s just this idea I have. But think about it. I mean, Mom escaped from Poland dressed as an Italian soldier! Why would she have to do that if she was Catholic? And why wouldn’t any other relatives be alive? This would explain so much.”

  “I just can’t see it,” Lara said. “Why would they hide their religion now?”

  I was disheartened by her lack of interest. “I know,” I agreed, “it’s pretty strange. But still …”

  I couldn’t let go of the idea. Believing we were Jewish offered me the possibility that my parents were still in hiding, that we were all in hiding, that all the underground emotional tunnels in our house were not just figments of my imagination.

  But the more I thought about it, the less I could justify my suspicions. Lara had a point—why would my parents deny their Judaism here in America, fifty years later? Perhaps, I thought, we were Jewish, or partly Jewish, but my parents didn’t even know themselves that they were Jewish.

  I tried this idea out on them at Christmas a year later. Lara had flown in from San Diego for the holiday, and I had arrived from Boston after finishing a legal ethics report for my office. Before dinner I found my mother in the kitchen, hoisting the twenty-two-pound turkey to the counter.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said. She muscled the bird onto the cutting board. Her forearms were covered with little notchlike burns from years of cooking.

  “Want some help?” I asked. I knew she never accepted help with anything.

  “No, no,” she said.

  “So here’s my theory, okay?”

  She rustled through the drawer for a serving spoon.

  “Maybe your mother was Catholic, and your father was Jewish, okay? Something like that. Big taboo. So when they married, your grandparents went through the roof, and that’s why you don’t know anything about them. Huge mega-rift in the family. And you wouldn’t even have known about it.”

  My mother was hacking up the turkey now, twisting its legs with her bare hands. The bone and cartilage broke, and steam poured from the leg sockets.

  “So what do you think?” I prodded her.

  She shrugged and took a butcher’s knife to the wings, then started on the breast. Juice streamed down the sides of the turkey and gurgled in the pan. Her eyes narrowed, examining the turkey’s exposed pink breast. “I don’t know,” she said. “Why do you think so?”

  “I’m just guessing,” I said. “But it would make sense. It would make sense if someone in your family was Jewish.”

  Thin slices of meat curled off the knife blade and onto her palm. She placed them on four waiting plates of white china.

  “I doubt it,” she said, pushing her bifocals back up her nose. “But I don’t know. The Germans would have known about that, I wouldn’t.”

  Her cheeks gleamed under the bright kitchen lights, and slight folds of skin gathered under her chin. She’d grown self-conscious about this lately and had taken to wearing turtlenecks.

  “Put some broccoli on here,” she said, pointing with the knife to a steaming pot. “And some of these baby potatoes.” She swung the pot of boiled potatoes from the burner toward me in a swift, fluid motion: Mikhail Baryshnikov in oven mitts. It was hard to believe she was in her mid-seventies.

  “That one’s for Dad,” she said, pointing to the plate in my left hand. “Now, take that in before it gets cold.”

  It’s crazy, I told myself—these wild guesses of Jewish roots—as if I were casting about for some adventure to beef up my ordinary American existence. I carried the plates into the dining room, and our family sat down to dinner.

  My mother brought in the last plate and passed the salt and pepper. “But what is it with you girls,” she said, puzzled and slightly annoyed. “What is it with all this Jewish business?” She turned from me to Lara. “All I hear now for months from you is about the past, our family, and so on. What is it all about?”

  I glanced across the table at my sister, but she avoided my eyes. She was researching our family history for her fellowship in child psychiatry, and now I wondered whether she, too, was beginning to think we were Jewish.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but I have the feeling that I’m Jewish. I don’t know why, exactly.”

  My mother stabbed a piece of turkey with her fork and smothered it with dressing.

  “Like that time,” I said, “I went to visit Rachel after my first year of law school.”

  Rachel’s mother was a Jewish Holocaust survivor. I’d spent a weekend at their house twelve years earlier. “Remember what I told you when I came back? That it was just like being at home. With her father listening to a violin concerto in the other room, and the living room filled with books, and all her mother’s plants in the windows. And we sat at the kitchen counter, Rachel and her mother and I, and sipped coffee and talked and talked—and for a moment I thought I was with you and Dad—it was just so much like home. I can’t explain it—but I remember I told you about it—there was a deep resonance somehow.”

  My mother snorted with disgust.

  “It’s not as if we discuss religion or anything,” I said quickly, “but it just so happens that most of my closest friends are Jews. I can’t help noticing it.” My mother was chasing a bit of cranberry relish around her plate with a piece of roll When she finally captured it, she chewed thoughtfully. “And most people assume I’m Jewish,” I added. “It’s always a surprise to them when I tell them I’m not.” I named some of my closest friends in recent years: Kari and Allen, Sue Klein, Annie and David.

  “Oh, I suppose next you’re going to tell me that Jean Sacks is Jewish,” my mother spat out.

  I wasn’t prepared for the hostility in her voice. Jean Sacks was my boss. African-American.

  “I’m not saying my only friends are Jewish,” I said quietly. “It’s just that—”